When he’s not busy dealing with well-documented evidence of chronic plagiarism (Our Bad Media, 9/24/14, 9/16/14, 11/10/14), Fareed Zakaria hosts a talk show on CNN. And this weekend (11/9/14), Zakaria had a commentary about how the public doesn’t know the first thing about the world.
“Americans voted on Tuesday for big change,” Zakaria explained to viewers, “but did they understand the facts that they wanted to change?”
The problem is that surveys show Americans think the unemployment rate is higher than it really is. They also think there are more immigrants and pregnant teens than there really are. And it’s not just Americans; Zakaria cites one study that shows this kind of ignorance is rampant all around the world.
He explained why this matters:
Well, if there is a chasm between perception and reality, then this does have huge implications for elections and policymaking. Politicians are then left to deal with false assumptions or over-imagined issues, many of which they, by the way, created or at least exacerbated.
It’s generous of Zakaria to slide in that acknowledgement that politicians, “by the way, created or at least exacerbated” some of these problems. Given that we just closed an election cycle that had politicians focusing on non-issues like Ebola in the United States or fear-mongering about ISIS militants crossing our border, one might not want to entirely place the emphasis on the public’s inability to see the world clearly.
He closes:
We all worry about the quality of politicians in today’s democracies. But what about the quality of voters? How can we make decisions about war and peace, expenditures and values, if citizens are totally wrong about the basic facts involved?
The answer is so simple: Blame the people!
The first response to this might be to wish that there were some kind of institution in our society designed to inform the public about what was going on in the world. If only.
The second response might be to wonder if someone who has the leisure to spend all of their time thinking about these important policy issues makes better decisions than the know-nothing public. Someone like, let’s say, Fareed Zakaria.
Did he, for instance, make the correct judgments about the Iraq War? No. As FAIR’s Iraq & the Media timeline points out for September 30, 2002:
A Newsweek report about widespread European opposition to the Iraq War is curiously headlined “The Lonesome Doves of Europe.” The magazine’s columnist Fareed Zakaria refers to Germany’s opposition to the war as “bizarre actions,” and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s anti-war position amounts to “pandering to public opinion.”
OK, so German politicians opposing war based on the public’s opposition to it were “pandering.”
Zakaria: “Iraq is surely producing weapons of mass destruction.” Whoops!
That wasn’t all he was writing about Iraq. As we noted (FAIR Blog, 8/26/11), in 2002 Zakaria wrote that “Iraq is surely producing weapons of mass destruction,” but they were so good at hiding them that international inspectors were unlikely to find anything. Thus, the Bush administration “must force a crisis” because the perfect time to invade would pass:
If events do not come to a head soon after December 8, the pressure for action will dissipate and the weather will make conflict impossible until next fall. And you cannot replay this movie.
From there, Zakaria began to worry (Newsweek, 2/17/03) that the United States would not stand up to the countries demanding more evidence before bombing: “Whatever one’s initial views about taking on Iraq–and I have been for it–I cannot see how America can back down without damaging its, well, credibility.” He went on to ask: “What would happen the next time the United States makes threats?”
Zakaria was an early and very vocal booster of George W. Bush, losing faith sometime in his second term. Why? He saw Bush’s foreign policy decisions as being a turn away from Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on human rights (Extra!, 4/07):
Zakaria lamented that the Bush administration “began intervening directly in the domestic affairs” of Latin American countries, a move he presented as a break from the recent past: “American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.”
Genocidal Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt with supporter Ronald Reagan.
This upside-down view of Reagan’s Latin America policies–which were anything but a defense of democracy or human rights, and took “intervening directly in the domestic affairs” to the extremes of invasion and covert guerrilla warfare–is deeply ironic, given Zakaria’s concern about public ignorance.
But Zakaria has a different standard for ignorant citizens and ignorant politicians. In his pro-Bush phase, he found a lack of understanding of the world to be a virtue, writing (Newsweek, 3/14/05) that Bush “has been fundamentally right about some big things.” He added:
Bush’s capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might have been disheartened.
So ignorance can be a virtue–in presidents, if not in the public.
Though he appeared to have been somewhat chastened by the Iraq War, Zakaria wound up cheering on the bombing of Libya (Time, 9/5/11), arguing that lessons had been learned, and this time around, the US would get things right.
Zakaria wants a better-informed public; almost no one would quibble with that. And it seems pretty obvious that a better, more skeptical media media might contribute to making people more knowledgeable about the world. But that’s a goal that will remain elusive so long as there is so little accountability for getting the big things wrong.
Yes, the public overestimates unemployment, and that’s not good. But most of us don’t have national media platforms to advocate for wars, corporate-friendly trade deals or the slashing of public workers’ pensions.
